Molran: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man by Andrew Hindle

Author:Andrew Hindle [Hindle, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: scifi, spaceship, science fiction
ISBN: 9781530605811
Google: _afQjwEACAAJ
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Published: 2016-06-08T04:00:00+00:00

MOS

Truly was it said that human beings were afraid of nothing. Never before in the history of evolution had any species ever been so afraid of nothing as the human race.

“Can’t be too careful these days,” the abrasive monkey on the patrol ship’s comm board said while Mos ground his teeth. “We’ve had sabotage threats, disruptions to our supply lines…”

Mos sat and let the man – or possibly woman, it was sometimes hard to tell from the sonorous monochromatic voices that humans had – jabber on self-importantly, not really listening to him.

I’m on board a refitted scout shuttle barely big enough to house a relative torus and a power cell to stoke it, he thought. The hab deck could house two out of three of living quarters, gravity exchange or luminal cannon, and since I’ve pinged you with a MundCorp chitty and I’m actually on board, you know I’m unarmed. What am I going to do to your precious megastructure, bite it?

“…to the orbital oversight station,” the human was saying. “Deviation from the assigned flight path…”

Mos tuned back out again. How creatures with such abrasive voices could love the sound of them so much was beyond him.

In the distance, the bright brown-grey ball of Kontarion Prime was revolving slowly in its cloud of construction debris and orbital structures. No, Mos reminded himself, it’s not called Kontarion Prime anymore. That there is the Wynstone Rex.

Not only had Kontarion Prime been upgraded to Wynstone Rex, she’d also been upgraded from gender-neutral planetary pronoun to the female starship pronoun. The Wynstone Rex wasn’t a ship yet, but she would be. According to the boasts of the humans involved, anyway. A starship that put all the Worldships of the Fleet to shame.

For the moment, the construction was semi-officially classified as ‘Wynstone Überhub’. Only the orbital blocks and the elevators were nearing completion, and that was the least of the job. But that didn’t stop the local authorities from insisting on the use of her end-stage designation. The Wynstone Rex was a new super-vessel concept of admittedly staggering ambition, and the locals insisted she was a ship, not a grossly augmented planet. And who was Mos to argue? He had to confess that even the foundation work done so far was impressive.

Ever since the Fleet had arrived at the humans’ strange homeworld and begun ferrying any who were interested out into space, the monkeys had been wildly overconfident in their ability to invent things. And they were industrious and lateral thinkers, it was true. Almost perversely lateral, in fact. And in the course of their horrifyingly war-torn and self-destructive history, they seemed to have forgotten far more than they knew about … well, just about everything.

Superluminal travel, for example. Some humans still tried to claim their species had invented it, and Mos was prepared to admit it was probably true – of the humans’ ancestors. Certainly the older Worldships had needed relative engines to be retrofitted, and had been strictly subluminal before that. The far

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